[neilio]

After finding a buyer for my rev. A 20" iMac G5, I received my new rev. B model at the end of May. Unfortunately, the firewire and Ethernet ports on that machine were dead, so Apple issued a RMA and replacement for it, which I just received yesterday.

With both rev. B models I noticed that the hard drive temperatures are much higher than with my first iMac - the SMART hard drive reporting mechanism showed that both machines' hard drives start low, but quickly ramp up to around 74 degrees Celsius (162 degrees Fahrenheit) and stay there.

The temperature probe on the drives hover at around 53-55 degrees Celsius (around 130 degrees Fahrenheit).

Besides the SMART temperature being rather alarming, the other issue with this is after the drive temperature hits around the 74 degree mark, all of the iMac fans come on quite loudly - the system and CPU fans hover at around 2000rpm, and the hard drive fan (the loudest one) goes up to between 3300 - 3600 rpms. Even with the fans on and the machine sitting idle for an hour the hard drive temperatures stay high.

The drive in both machines was / is a Maxtor 250G.

Is anyone else noticing high hard drive temperatures with the new iMacs?

Neil

[ClosedCircuit]

Temperature Monitor 2.5 reports similar hard drive temperatures for me. I'm using a Rev. B 20" iMac G5 with a 250 GB Maxtor hard drive (model 7Y250M0).

The SMART Disk sensor hovers at around 71 degrees C. The sensor labeled "Hard Drive" (which is planted on the outside of the drive...?) stays at about 54 degrees C. My hard drive fan is going at 3800 RPM.

My CPU temp is at 60 degrees C. The CPU fan is running at 2700 RPM and the system fan is running at 2900 RPM.

The only applications I have open are Adium (IM), iTunes, Temperature Monitor, and Safari... not really a very taxing load by my estimation. It is not especially cool in here (about 25 degrees C), but not terrible.

I have no idea if these temperatures/fan speeds are normal or not as I've only had the computer for a couple days now, but I got concerned when reading other reports of capacitors blowing, etc. in the new iMacs (with heat the suspected culprit).

On a related note, I tried the programs ThermographX and X Resource Graph, and they give different temperature readings than Temperature Monitor for the CPU sensor -- ThermographX reads the temp as 7 degrees C higher than Temperature Monitor! Strange.

Joe

[Agent69]

Go to the BeatFeats review of the iMac G5 revision B, and take a look at the portion of hard disk temps.